Antonio Gramsci

Political Theory Italian 1891 – 1937 100 quotes

An Italian Marxist philosopher and politician who developed the concept of cultural hegemony, explaining how dominant ideologies maintain power in society.

Quotes by Antonio Gramsci

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

Prison Notebooks 1930

History teaches, but has no pupils.

Prison Notebooks 1929

My dear sissy, I am writing to you from prison. The cell is small, but my thoughts are vast.

Letter 1927

The intellectual's error consists of believing he can be a politician without becoming a politician.

Prison Notebooks 1932

One cannot make a revolution with weaklings.

Speech 1920

The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence... but in active participation in social and political life.

Prison Notebooks 1930

To criticize one's own past is to prepare for the future.

Prison Notebooks 1931

The active man is the one who bends circumstances and modifies them.

Prison Notebooks 1929

What the proletariat needs is a leader who is at the same time a philosopher.

Article 1918

The press should be the tribune of the people.

Article 1917

Culture has always been the domain of the ruling class.

Prison Notebooks 1930

The philosophy of praxis does not tend to close itself up in a circle of pure theory.

Prison Notebooks 1932

In the absence of a dominant class, the state becomes the instrument of the bureaucracy.

Prison Notebooks 1930

To live means to take sides.

Article 1917

The organic intellectuals are distinguished by their active participation in social life.

Prison Notebooks 1930

Revolution is not a dinner party.

Speech 1920

The function of the intellectual is to produce hegemony.

Prison Notebooks 1932

Man is above all a political animal.

Prison Notebooks 1929

The past should be studied not for its own sake, but for the sake of the future.

Prison Notebooks 1931

Every man, in as much as he is a man, is an intellectual.

Prison Notebooks 1930